Entities such as companies and agencies in which there is significant risk of harm to employees or agents often use personal security systems to mitigate the risk. Some examples of the entities include banks, check cashing companies, pawn shops, realtors, private security companies, insurance companies, law enforcement agencies, and individual citizens, among others.
A trend has been to implement these personal security systems on mobile computing devices (e.g. applications or apps executing on smart phones or tablet devices). These devices work in cooperation with a monitoring center. The monitoring center can be administered by the entity, a third party company (for example, a private security company), or a law enforcement agency. In one example, the employee or agent calls the monitoring center directly to report a suspicious individual. In another example, the employee or agent calls the monitoring center directly at the beginning of a routine sequence of actions and stays on the call with the monitoring center until the employee or agent verbally confirms that they have completed the sequence (for example, opening a branch of a bank or check cashing service and stays on the phone with the monitoring center until they have arrived safely at the branch and the opening process is complete).
Personal security systems have also included a trigger mechanism that, when activated, causes the mobile application executing on the mobile computing device to contact the monitoring center and/or activate other security features. Examples of the trigger mechanism include a virtual panic button.
Some personal security systems record information about the user's surroundings. This information can be forwarded to the monitoring center and/or to a law enforcement agency to be used in investigating a security event and providing aid to users involved in a security event. Typically, mobile computing devices include various mechanisms by which information about the surrounding environment can be recorded. Examples include microphones for recording audio information, cameras for recording video information, and global navigation satellite system receivers for determining location information (for example, GPS coordinates). In one example, audio and video information is recorded in response to a particular event, such as the user pressing the virtual panic button. In another example, the mobile application records audio and video information continuously initiated by a countdown timer elapsing, but then records audio and video information at a higher frame rate in response to the user pressing the virtual panic button.